Creating Community Through Jewish Cohousing
This week’s post is by Roger Studley, founder of Urban Moshav in Berkeley, CA.
Urban Moshav is an ambitious project: we aim to create “Jewish cohousing” communities around the United States. These communities will function like archetypal villages,…
Lifting Up the Voices of Women
This week’s post is by Talia Liben Yarmush, co-founder of Achayot: Sisterhood of Jewish Women Writers.
At its foundation, Achayot is built on the principles of wisdom/chochma and community/kehilla. Recognizing the rich legacy of Jewish text and tradition, with a desire to incorporate this legacy into our own writing …
The Emerging Jewish Community: A Riotous Forest of Life
This week’s post is by Rabbi Ariel Stone, Rabbi of independent Congregation Shir Tikvah of Portland Oregon and the convener of Portland Interfaith Clergy Resistance.
The first word that caught my eye in Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Futurewas on the first page: rethinking. My congregational work has focused upon the need…
Weaving Community in Philadelphia
This week’s post is by Miriam Steinberg-Egeth, managers of manages two community networks, the Center City Kehillah and the Board of Rabbis of Greater Philadelphia. A community is like a puzzle. Each piece has to have its place among all the others for the project to work. An individual piece on its own is not […]
A Judaism for Flourishing
This week’s post is by Rabbi Ben Spratt, the Senior Associate Rabbi of Congregation Rodeph Sholom in Manhattan. I begin with a belief that is neither new nor radical: the purpose of Judaism is fulfillment and flourishing, personally and globally. Maimonides made this claim in his Guide for the Perplexed, saying that the whole of […]
Building a New Community from Scratch
This week’s column is by Lauren Spokane of the New Synagogue Project, an emerging Jewish community in in Washington, D.C. The four propositions laid out by Sid Schwarz are clearly reflected in the community we are building in the Washington, DC region through the New Synagogue Project (NSP). Here is how each proposition shows up in our […]
Seeing Jewish Portals through Israeli Eyes
I am an Israeli, working in a progressive, Reconstructionist Congregation for two years as a shaliach. My goal is to bring to American Jews some of the rich culture that is part and parcel of Israeli life outside of Orthodox circles. But my presence in America also exposes me to the way that American Jews […]
Purpose and Community: Building Blocks for True Spirituality
Mekor Shalom focuses on two of the four propositions that Rabbi Sid Schwarz sets forth in Jewish Megatrends: Charting the Course of the American Jewish Community. About community/kehilla, Rabbi Schwarz writes that “the Jewish community must offer places where people can find support in times of need, communal celebration in times of joy, and friendships to […]
Co-Housing: Taking Congregational Life to the Next Level
Temple Bnai Israel in Northeast Connecticut has been involved in a “visioning process” for the last several years about how to “to formulate the best way to sustainably foster and serve the Jewish community in North East Connecticut (including the non-Jewish participants in that community) for the coming several decades.” We launched this process in […]
Social Justice in Their Judaism
The Jewish Alliance for Law and Social Action (JALSA) asks people to act on their Jewish values in the pursuit of social, economic, environmental, and racial justice. The “tools” we use to achieve those ends include advocacy, community organizing, coalition building, litigation, and education. Our members, volunteers, and donors cross many generations, ranging from their […]
Live with Purpose
LIVE with purpose.LIVE with meaning.LIVE with kindness. Our privilege and our responsibility as human beings is to LIVE on this earth. Tapping into the sacred text of Torah, we learn from the first story that God has established a unique partnership with human beings – one of trust. God entrusts human being with the task […]
Engaging Gen Zers
I see my work aligned closely with Rabbi Sid’s proposition about with community/kehilla. He writes: – “At a time when technology has made meaningful social intercourse much harder to come by, the Jewish community must offer places where people can find support in times of need, communal celebration in times of joy, and friendships to […]
The Part-Time Dual-Role Rabbi: Secular and Spiritual Entwining
If I’m a Jewish trendsetter, it’s at least partly by accident and, because “There is nothing new under the sun” (Eccl. 1:9), the trend that I am setting is a rabbinic “Back to the Future.” I am North America’s only pulpit rabbi simultaneously maintaining a full-time public oath of office. I serve full-time in the […]
What My Children Have Taught Me About Jewish Identity
Who is wise? I believe it is the one that learns from his children. As I read about megatrends in Judaism and religious life, I understand what I read through the lens of my two adult children. Here’s my Jewish background so as to explain what may seem to be my approach. I am a […]
Birthing as a Portal into Jewish Life
Imeinu Jewish Birth Workers Collective is a network of birth professionals and other service providers who are committed to offering physical, emotional, informational and spiritual care to the laboring mother, her baby and her family to encourage the most positive pregnancy, childbirth and postpartum experience. We are honored to offer resources for childbirth as a […]
A Congregation Without Walls
Mine is a congregation that doesn’t read books such as Jewish Megatrends (though it occurs to me that I should send them the chapter on which we’ve been asked to write this essay), so its members don’t quite get how at least two of the three factors Rabbi Schwarz described (the two that aren’t about […]
Extending our Values to all God’s Creatures
My work with Jewish Initiative for Animals (JIFA) engages institutions and individuals of all stripes to turn the Jewish value of concern for animal welfare into action—a mission that aligns with and transcends the four propositions that Sid Schwarz outlines in Jewish Megatrends. Chochma /Wisdom There are ways in which the traditional Jewish framework for […]
Challenging the Jewish Establishment on Israel/Palestine
IfNotNow was founded in the summer of 2014, during the war in Gaza. The movement’s founders were all Jewish millennials, some with roots in the institutional Jewish world, having grown up going to Jewish day school or summer camps, and others had little to no connection to the organized Jewish community. The founders of this […]
An Intercultural Minyan in Washington D.C.
When the American Synagogue came into being, the institutional structure had to respond to, and contend with, the societal challenges of the time: social circles being segregated by race, class, and religion; the push and pull of assimilation vs. maintaining a strong – but foreign – identity; and the concentration of resources and communication around […]
Jewish Community: The Other Side of Plenty
The “forced continuity” of the Jewish community of the 80s and 90s, as mentioned in Jewish Megatrends, gave birth to frustrated Jews who felt that it was an all-or-nothing reality– do and believe what the religion required, or abstain from it. Meanwhile, these same individuals were told that they could change the world. The Boomer […]
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